my father has a hard drive that stopped working. the first thought was that it was the mother board. the first problem was the usb ports or drivers stopped. i could not determine why (the usb mouse stopped responding and a ps/2 mouse worked). ten days later the hard drive stopped powering up and all that happened when i turned the computer on was an error it loaded the bios and my operating systen would not load. the hard drive beeps one time a few seconds after it is turned on. i have installed this drive in annother compter with the jumpers set as a slave unit as well as cable select (the cables were properly configured) . with this drive installed in any configuration it still wil not let the master drive load the operating system. (perhaps more of a problem than not) please help. i need the database info off the hard drive. thanks. mike

Sounds like the drive may be dead, making any data recovery an expensive endeavor. But to make sure it's interferring with the good drive on the same data cable, connect the possibly bad drive by itself on the secondary IDE port. (You may need to temporarily disconnect whatever is on that cable--cdrom, etc.) That is, assuming the other PC has both primary and secondary ports. Another thing, are you sure the 'other computer' is able to see the drive OK? Big drives attached to old motherboards sometimes aren't seen right. Help me Jebus!